After dinner this evening, Lyssa, Jason, and I once again invaded our local movie theatre to catch the late showing of Green Lantern, the latest comic book movie of the summer to hit the silver screen. It was a bit of scramble to get tickets because we got there late but we just made it. I have to confess, as a fan of the comic I greatly enjoyed this movie. That might make all the difference between enjoying Green Lantern, and walking out of the theatre at the end feeling a little cold...
Tomorrow is Free RPG Day once again, a day to let your nerd flag fly by paying your friendly local gaming store a visit to see what they have in stock. If they're worth the Cheetos and Mountain Dew on their gaming tables they'll have some nifty new games for you to take home for the asking (it is Free RPG Day, after all). If you're lucky you'll be able to try them in the store with your closest friends (or people you don't even know, which can be just as fun). Or maybe you heard about tomorrow well in …
Last week word about the album Ultrawired from a band called Dope Stars Inc. exploded onto Twitter. DSI, as they are called (because 140 characters enforces a certain amount of textual economy) are based in Italy and have a decidedly retro sound and image as bands go these days. They are heavily inspired by the sound and appearance of some of the synthpop, industrial, and techno acts of the early to mid 1990's as well as some influential metal bands of the 1980's (they specifically cite Guns 'n' Roses and Motley Crue as some sources of their inspiration). If you …
If you've never heard of a flashmob before, it's when word gets out somehow for everyone who finds out about it to gather at a particular place and time, count down from five, and then do something weird. There have been flashmobs where everyone opened an umbrella for precisely 23 seconds, made chicken noises, turned their shirts inside out, had a pillow fight, and even briefly created a supercomputer. About five years ago, there was even a silent disco held in the stations of London's subway system and 1,000 people gathered for a flash rave in Union Square in …
Earlier this month (I know, I know, I plead working on the weekends) Ben Mendis and I presented at NOVALUG on Project Byzantium. We had a pretty good turnout that Saturday, especially seeing as how the location was changed at the last minute but the NOVALUG website hadn't been updated. Ben and I had worked on the presentation all week using Google Docs and I think we did a pretty good job of putting together a framework to speak from that didn't put people to sleep. I also think we did a pretty good job for a) not rehearsing together …
In the past couple of weeks it's become something of a fad to post about the genre of cyberpunk becoming somewhat passe'. We now live in the twenty-first century, where much of the fiction that my generation grew up reading was ostensibly set. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. We don't really have food pills, either, but the nutrient and protein shakes that you can buy in the cold case of just about every convenience store these days (or the frankly awful tasting energy drinks that are popular with the younger set) aren't that far off. We do have …
